One Hundred
Important Ophthalmology Books
of the 20th Century
by
H. Stanley Thompson M.D. & Donald L. Blanchard M.D.
Introduction
We originally set ourselves to this project with the encouragement of Dr Daniel Albert, the Editor of the AMA Archives of Ophthalmology, but it kept growing until it was much too long to publish in the pages of the Archives. The alternative was to introduce the idea and the list of 100 titles in the Journal with a very clear arrow - http://webeye.ophth.uiowa.edu/dept/20thCenturyBooks - pointing to where the main text could be found on the internet. This text tells something of the author, the printing history and place of the book in 20th century ophthalmology. The fact that you are now reading this on a computer suggests that you have been able to follow that arrow. If you have stumbled on this by chance or by word of mouth you should know that this material started out in the AMA Archives of Ophthalmology, and that the "arrow" is on pages 761-763, volume 119, issue 5, May 2001.
We have found the project to be interesting, enjoyable and intensely instructive, but at the end we found ourselves making some coin-toss decisions about rounding the collection out to exactly 100 titles. This made us uncomfortably aware of the imperfections of our list. We have recognized from the beginning that the mere act of presenting such a list is to ask for dissent and disparagement. To start with, what does "important" mean? Does it just mean popular? Is Duke-Elder on the list just because a lot of copies of his book were sold? It has been our hope to call a book "important" when there seems to be some agreement that the book has made a significant contribution to ophthalmic knowledge or practice. We concede that it often takes time for the word to get around about the excellence or significance of a certain book. This means that when a consensus has been reached there may well have been quite a few copies sold.
Some books published in the last decade of the 20th Century will continue to be useful and popular well into the 21st century, but so far, they have only had time to put their stamp on the 1990s. For this reason we have found it hard to evaluate them as 20th century monuments. By the year 2020 a general agreement may have finally been reached about the importance of these books. If our list is a little weighted towards the first half of the century, this delay may have been a contributing factor. By the same token, some books first written in the 1890s continued, through new editions, to have a major influence into the 20th century, and we have included a few of these in our list. The result is that our definition of the 20th century is a little fuzzy at both ends.
Another problem with our list of books is that many of the most significant contributions to ophthalmic knowledge were first offered in professional journals, and the author never got around to writing a book on the subject. Ours is unabashedly a list of books. An objection might easily be raised that books are just one kind of retrievable information package, so why not consider all such packages in every kind of database? Our first answer is that we are fond of books. Books are not only discrete, compact and accessible, they also can be attractive because their physical qualities appeal to some of our other senses. The palpable heft of the book, the feel of the binding and the paper, the art and skill of the typography and illustrations are all part of "reading" a book. A book comes saturated with the personality and voice of the author; it is designed to be held in its owner's hands and to be read, shelved and re-read as needed. Our second reason is that we have to draw the line somewhere, and by limiting ourselves to books we have side-stepped the impossible task of writing a comprehensive History of Ideas in 20th Century Ophthalmology.
We have asked many others to give us their choices, but in the end this is our personal list, tilted inevitably by our own personal, American exposure to ophthalmic books and by our inclination towards the English language. We have made no attempt to rank all 100 of these books in order of their importance: we are not that foolhardy! We have listed them chronologically within eleven areas of ophthalmology. Our feeling is that there might be a fairly general agreement that most of these 100 ophthalmic titles deserve mention among the most influential of the century. The remainder will be on someone’s list but not on everybody’s.
Parts of this introduction, and the two tables, appeared in our editorial in the AMA Archives of Ophthalmology 119(5): 761-763, May 2001, and have been reproduced here with permission.